After a few weeks of this, it had become clear to me that I was reverse cursed. Only good things could happen to me. Everyone else got all the bad. I ran a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. I personally collected hundreds of millions in performance fees a year. I could afford any house I wanted in the world. I could live anywhere. Where did I live? In perfect-land: Greenwich, Connecticut. I was next door to the greatest city in the world. I had no family to spend it on. I had the most incredible life—and predictably, the rest of the world was pissed off about it.

So I poured myself into the back of the town car and we drove off down past the Westchester airport and eventually you get to that point where New York turns into the Bronx, and you look off 95 and there is just an endless number of chop shops, and the car goes by the self-storage place that was once a bombed-out building with broken glass, and just earlier that day, there was a guest on CNBC talking about Wall Street greed, and I thought, for fuck’s sake, it’s a job, and I thought about Dan Waterson, and I thought about the phone number in my bank account, and I would still be trading stocks even if I got paid one percent of what I got paid. I am just doing what I like to do. I am just having fun.

So the car drops me off at Sparks on 46th, and Booner is waiting at the curb, hustles me inside, out of the drizzle, I give my coat to the woman who remembers everything, and we are in the back room, and Booner is on my left, and Tod, the vol trader, is on my right, and CN is on his right, and this girl was on his right, then back to Boone Dog, who says to me, “What do you think of the market here?” and I just stare at him, you just don’t get it, and everyone is staring at me, the awkward silence, which never bothers me—I like silence, and finally CN bails him out, tells him it’s the low-quality stocks that are leading, and he knows this because that’s what I’ve been buying hand over fist, in an effort to lose money.

I have nothing to say.

Boone Dog is a professional but is little more than a cog in the system; just another sales trader at just another bank. He happens to be a good sales trader at a good bank. Tod has talent but is depraved. Nobody knows this. CN is desperate. The girl is interesting, or at least, she will be when she gets older. They’re all smart, successful people, some of the best young financial minds assembled in one room, but they can’t possibly comprehend what’s in store for them, in their careers. You choose a life based on chance and probability, you learn there are consequences to winning as well as losing.